"New" MY13 owner in NZ

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Matty

Member
Joined
Jun 24, 2018
Messages
15
Location
New Zealand
Greetings all. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth at the upward-spiraling price of petrol here in New Zealand, my wife and I recently picked up a JDM 2013 Leaf X, with 43K km (~27K miles) on the odo and 11 bars. I'd already spent some time looking through the threads on here before purchasing, so a belated thank you to all for your unwitting input. Currently the Guessometer says we should get about 127km on a full charge, which is more than enough for the trips it'll be doing around our small town and the surrounding area - it'll rarely be asked to do more than about 70km in a day.

Unfortunately it wasn't the best introduction to EV motoring as the 12V battery went flat part-way through the school run on the first day, stranding my wife at my daughter's school. However since getting the dealer to replace the 12V it's been fine since. We're very much petrolheads so it's been a real change of mindset, and my wife has even started wavering on her two previous absolutes of vehicle purchases, namely RWD/AWD and as big an engine as will fit in the chassis.

I've been quite surprised by how spritely the car is - on the test drive I was a little underwhelmed and figured maybe coming from our current car (essentially a wagon version of an Infiniti G35X) was just tainting the impression, but once we'd picked it up I tried a few "what'll she do Mister" runs and was surprised to get wheelspin off the mark, and even at 40km/h on a wet road.

We're still hoons at heart though, so we've already tossed up the idea of suspension mods and more performance-oriented tyres. I know it'll drop the range somewhat, but we have plenty to spare so losing 10% or so won't matter. I also have a mate who tunes high performance vehicles (and heavy vehicles like CATs etc) and is reverse engineering a Leaf control unit, so maybe there's more options to come in future too, it's early days yet.

TL;DR: Hi, I bought a 2013 Leaf and I type a lot.

Cheers,
Matty.
 
Okay, nearly 4 weeks in and we've very quickly got used to driving an appliance around town. It's working out very nicely for us. Here's some metrics, converted to USD and US Gallons for easy consumption by the majority on here.

Power costs around 21c/kWh, which is pretty high compared to what other posters are paying. The "greenie" upside for us is that around 80% of New Zealand's power is generated from renewable resources (from highest to lowest: hydro, geothermal, wind, solar).

Fuel is even worse - a bit over $6/gal for premium, and it's only going up, with major infrastructure projects underway meaning the government is introducing higher fuel taxes. EVs are exempt from any road user charges until 2021, or until the EV fleet is 2% of all registered vehicles, whichever comes first. As it stands there are around 3.5M vehicles on the road, and around 8,000 EVs, so my money's on 2021.

Based on our daily usage we were spending about $420/month on fuel, while with the Leaf we're using about $80/month of power, so will be saving a little over $4,000/year. This means the car will have paid for itself in around 2 years and 10 months, at which point any money we get back for it is a bonus since we never bought it for resale value.

Coupled with the $3,000 or so we should get by selling the car the Leaf is replacing, it's turned out to be a very sound decision for our purposes.
 
I also brought a 2013 Nissan Leaf X.
Last week in Dunedin, 19,000 km and 90% SOH

Very quiet and smooth with so many features.
I calculated the cost / km and compared it to my old Toyota Vitz/Yaris and it is 4 to 5 times cheaper on fuel costs.

The only thing is you really have to be careful when driving in the country, the battery runs flat really quickly at a 100 kph.
In the deep south there are not many charging stations.

21c/kwh? Seems quite steep, have you tried switchme.co.nz?

Electricity is 97% renewable down here, so even greener.
 
Inver57 said:
21c/kwh? Seems quite steep, have you tried switchme.co.nz?

That's a(nother) curse of living in the North Island, our power prices are significantly higher than down there - we're already on the best deal we could find. We're renting at the moment (Hawkes Bay) but once we've found some land to put an old villa on we're going to install as much solar as we can and see if we can go off-grid.
 
So 8 months on the car has largely been great. My wife uses it for the school and shopping runs all day every day, covering about 40-50 miles per day in stop/start fashion. After we got over the usual range anxiety we started pushing how far we'd travel further and now we barely even think about it. Many strangers have asked us about the car and I'm sure we've done our bit to sell them in the area as they seem to be everywhere now - we have a game with the kids to spot a Leaf on every trip.

There's a couple of issues though, one minor and one rather worrying. There's a clicking noise coming from the front that happens when braking to and accelerating from a standstill. It sounds like a sticking brake caliper but I don't feel anything like a jerking when it clicks, and if I'm gentle enough I can brake and accelerate without hearing the noise at all. This makes be think it might be something like a compression bush, so I'll look at that later.

The worrying issue though is we've lost 2 bars in months and we're down to 9, with only 34,000 miles on the odo. The first bar (from 11 to 10) went about a month after we bought it, which I figured was just a case of bad luck/timing. However I noticed last night we were now down to 9. This will still do the trips but I wonder if we're killing it with our charging regime.

After the first loss we started charging to 80% each night, with only a few charges to 100% when we needed to take longer trips. My wife has started giving it regular "top ups" at home during the day if she needs to do any unexpected trips, but by the end of the day the car is often down around 20-30%.

I did some digging through the forums and it looks like we should really have been doing cell balancing every week or so. I don't have the skills to build any of the monitoring equipment mentioned in the pages linked in the Cell Balancing 101 thread, so would charging it to 100% every week or so suffice? I don't have a LeafSpy so can't check up on the battery at home so I might have to take it into Nissan and see what their reasoning is.
 
I'm afraid the news is worse than lack of balanced cells. You appear to be the victim of a BMS reset, either by the dealer or "upstream" in the sales stream. Unless it's Blazing hot there, I'll confidently guess that your car was built before April of 2013, and has the bad old battery chemistry. It likely had 9 bars when wholesaled. Now is the time to get after the dealer for selling you a car with a badly degraded battery - although they will claim ignorance, maybe correctly...
 
Oh awesome, I did wonder about that too. Any way to find out if a reset's been done? I was given a Battery Information Sheet by the dealer when we bought the car that I think was supposed to allay any concerns we may have had about the car. Fortunately I never clean out my laptop bag so I have all the sales documentation still.

It has a snapshot from a Consult-III plus (version 81.30 if it matters) of the cell voltage loss inspection screen saying no module requires replacement and with a voltage loss judgement value of 3555.583333mV.

The sheet also has "star ratings" for various categories of battery assessment, and it got top marks for the following:
- Frequent charging when battery state of charge is already high (i.e. this rarely/never happened)
- Too much electric consumption while driving
- Long term parking with high state of charge

It got 4 stars out of 5 for "Frequent use of quick charging".

So it all looked good from that perspective. On closer inspection of the sheet I note that although we have a MY13 Leaf its production date was actually 10/2012, so it's one of the very early Gen 2 models.

We bought the car through the local Nissan dealer but it's not technically from Nissan as they never officially imported more than a handful of them, although now EVs are gaining wider acceptance in New Zealand they'll be bringing in the 60kWh models. We got it as a test bed to see if we could handle driving an EV day to day so we might point out to them that maybe a VW eGolf or Hyundai Kona will be our next car rather than a new Leaf.
 
Don't bother finding the Nissan "battery report" - it's worthless. And the cell voltage test is just to make sure there aren't any bad individual cells. The car is still under an 8 year cell defect warranty, but the degradation warranty is long expired, assuming the car put in service before 2014.

How to tell a BMS reset from "normal" capacity loss? You have already done so, by losing two capacity bars in a short period. One bar lost can always be explained, as you correctly noted, by the pack being 'on the verge' of losing one. Two in a few months is very abnormal, and is the best indicator of a reset.
 
Matty said:
Ok thanks for your advice, I think I'll go down to the dealer and start slamming phone books on desks.

I understand. Now a bit more crucial advice: neither Nissan nor their affiliated dealers will accept LeafSpy findings as evidence, so there is little point in even mentioning it. What Nissan uses, usually to their advantage, is the capacity bar readings on the dash. Losing one bar will get you little more than a shrug. Losing TWO or more in a short period puts them on the spot. Expect to hear, first, that "that isn't unusual." It definitely is unusual. Next will likely be "They must have worked on the car and accidentally reset the BMS (also called the LBC or "lithium battery controller"). This is actually a valid possibility, but it doesn't change the fact that you were sold a car with a mis-represented battery capacity. THIS is what you must use as your leverage to get them to take the car back. Don't let them "fix it" as this will just be another reset. Your only real remedy, unless you can live with a 30 mile range and a ton of money back, is for them to take the car back and refund all of your money. Sadly, even if they will only refund 90% of it, that remains the best option.
 
We don't have a LeafSpy so no worries there. I've done better than slamming books though: I sent my wife in instead since I can't get away from work at the moment. Everyone but the accountant was out to lunch at the time (sounds promising...) and all he did was try to upsell to a MY17 they had on the lot. We're now waiting for their Leaf specialist to call back, I'm sure he'll be tied up in meetings with the dealer principal. All we've been told so far is they may replace any faulty cells but I'd need more information before going down that rabbit hole, I was in a meeting at the time so couldn't dig any deeper.

New Zealand isn't as litigious as the US but we can fall back on the Consumer Guarantees Act, which carries a fair amount of weight when it comes to disputes - our argument would be that no one should reasonably expect an EV battery to degrade by about 20% on an annualised basis, regardless of it being 5 years old when we bought it. I haven't heard of any other cases like it in NZ so it could get messy for the dealer if they don't tread carefully.

Under the Act the three options would be repair, replace or refund. Even a 90% refund would be fine by me since we've saved more than 20% of the purchase price in fuel since buying it. :D
 
There will be no bad cells to replace, in all likelihood - the cells usually degrade evenly. The "up-sell" (with little or no extra cash from you) to a '17 is a possibility, but....

The '16 30kwh batteries built early in the model year have had a high rate of cell failures. That would be covered under warranty, but would be a hassle. The other big issue with the 30kwh pack is that many owners have experienced what seems to be rapid degradation like that found in the first Leaf batteries. Nissan insists that this is in fact just a "BMS reporting error," and they have issued a software "fix" that appears to resolve the problem: the SOH, estimated range, and capacity bars showing usually all jump back up. What concerns me is that not all Leaf drivers who have had this update report restored range. Further, I would expect a BMS programming error to show up in ALL of the 30kwh packs. Instead, it only appears in some of them. Finally, it looks like NZ is getting 'grade B' (and worse) Leafs from lease turn ins, so I would expect that '17 Leaf to have the "BMS reporting error." Still, the capacity warranty for the '17 is 8 bars guaranteed for 8 years, meaning that you should never have less capacity than a good 24kwh Leaf while the car is less than 8 years old. If you are willing to take on the potential hassle (and potential benefits) of negotiating to get that '17 for very little extra money, that could, if you still want a Leaf, to be a viable avenue...
 
Sorry, I've misled you - it's a 2017 car but MY18, so 40kWh.

To be honest it's really dented by trust in Nissan, but if worst comes to worst we may just take whatever deal we can get, and hold out til the Taycan and/or various Audis are available.
 
Matty said:
Sorry, I've misled you - it's a 2017 car but MY18, so 40kWh.

To be honest it's really dented by trust in Nissan, but if worst comes to worst we may just take whatever deal we can get, and hold out til the Taycan and/or various Audis are available.

So it was built in late 2017 as a 2018? Given your climate I might consider leasing one of those (see my signature line) but not keep it more than 3 years. I understand completely your decline in trust in Nissan - many, MANY of us have experienced it! So, as I see it, these are your choices:

* Keep your car, and get a big partial refund. If you don't need more than 40 miles of range for the next several years, that could be a cheap way to drive an EV while you wait for a better one. In the US, a degraded early build 2013 SL is worth, depending on option packages and region, about $5000-$6000 USD - if nice.

* Get a full refund. This is your best bet, as it gives you full choice and gets you out of a car with no real remaining warranty and declining range.

* Leverage their...we'll say "mistake" into getting a great deal on one of their other cars. Lots of risk there, maybe a good deal if you are lucky. So I guess you have to ask yourself: "Am I feeling lucky?"
 
FINALLY got the car into Nissan for them to have a look at. They checked it over and came back with "there's nothing wrong with the battery." They also said "the guy who looks after these is away on holiday so we didn't really know what to do" but from what they've been able to check we're doing everything right with how we're charging and driving the car. Good one, Nissan. I despair.

Knocking at the front turned out to be a strut mount, we've booked it back in again in May so that can be sorted at the same time as its annual roadworthy check. Their Leaf "expert" should be back from holiday by then so we'll try again with him. We figure at least we've started the dialogue so there's a record of the issue.

Being an early adopter sucks sometimes. At least I still have my S2000 for old school mechanical failure certainty. :mrgreen:
 
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